By Andrea Falbo
Staff Writer

The Wellness Center will be starting a seat belt campaign in the next few weeks to encourage students to buckle up.

"Our primary objective is to raise awareness and get students to wear seatbelts," said Amanda Barber, wellness education coordinator.

After the tragic deaths of five Purdue students in four months, the Student Wellness Center began devising a campaign to make Purdue students aware of the dangers of driving without a seatbelt. Beginning early next fall, a full-blown seat belt campaign will be implemented. This campaign will consist of a slogan not yet determined, messages posted around campus and a prize patrol for students.

The prize patrol will go around and look at students' cars to see if they have a special window sticker on them. The Wellness Center will provide these stickers, and the prize patrol will select a sticker-sporting car's owner to receive a prize. These stickers will be available next fall in the residence halls and parking services.

The Wellness Center is hoping that the local bookstores will also participate in handing out these stickers. There will be a total of 75 prizes given out, about one a week. During more frequent driving times, like October Break and Thanksgiving, there will be more prizes given out for stickers.

"We just want people to buckle up. When they are driving from campus to the mall, or campus to home — it doesn't matter how far you are going, you need to buckle up. Even if you are in a fender bender you can still get injured," said Barber. "These are things in your life that can be preventable."

In the next few weeks the Wellness Center will begin to raise awareness among students by just sending out messages.

Nancy Maylath, director of the Student Wellness Center, said, "We want to send messages out on BTV and in the residence halls within the next few weeks before students go home to buckle up for their drive home."

In Indiana, 63 percent buckle up, according to a survey done by Purdue and Indiana University in 1997.

A person is killed every 13 minutes and injured every nine seconds in automobile accidents. There are 42,000 deaths each year and 3 million injured from automobile accidents. Traffic accidents are the leading cause of unintentional deaths.

Last year the West Lafayette Police Department gave out 380 tickets for seatbelt violations. In Indiana, there is a primary seat belt law that states that a police officer can pull a person over just because they are not wearing a seat belt.

Another Indiana secondary law is that if a person is pulled over for a moving violation, a police officer can give the person a citation for not wearing a seat belt.